First spinach harvest

I'm a really lazy gardener.*  I told my friend Lydia recently that if I can't just stick the seed in some dirt in the sun and occasionally water it, I really don't want to bother.  Also, I have a 2 year old helping me so things aren't going to be perfect.  Hence, our pot of spinach was looking like this:

A little crowded on the one side, eh?  This is where you're supposed to thin things out, so I picked some of the baby leaves the other day and put them in meatballs!

 I sort of fudged the recipe from my favorite turkey meatball recipe from Ellie Krieger.  (I loved to watch her back in the old days when we had TV.  Recently I discovered you could watch her on Hulu and that made me happy.) I added the chopped spinach and some ricotta cheese, because I had it in the fridge.

They were yummy.  We ate them for lunch today with some pasta, and Cadence noticed the suspicious green thing on her fork.  She quickly asked me what it was, and when I said it was spinach from our garden she was totally eager to eat it.  For a kid who's totally not a veggie fan - it's shameful, I know, especially when I will eat anything under the sun, and gladly - this just proved to me that all that stuff I've heard and read about how growing a garden will make kids want to eat vegetables might actually be true!

*I'm also a cheap gardener.  All our seeds this year are actually from last year (except the sugar snap peas, which I bought to do the old start-a-sprout-in-a-plastic-bag-with-a-damp-cottonball-on-a-window-trick with Cadence.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, clearly you have never been involved with preschool or children's Sunday School).  I didn't use all the seeds in the packets, so I put them in a ziploc bag in the fridge and, so far, they are growing fine.  I think the secret to saving seeds is making sure they are not exposed to moisture.  Hence the baggie&fridge storage method.